Hi everyone I have been using AI for half a year, I am self-taught, and it works great--but it is very tedious and learning new things can take a long time to master. I have been told about Inkscape more than once, and I am curious to see how well it works for clip art -type illustration, as that is my passion.

Originally I would create closed paths, and have the line art and fills on separate layers, group them all together, arrange the layers accordingly to set everything in its place, and then change the fill colors. This works fairly well, except it controls where I can adjust the stroke widths on the line art since everything is set on closed paths. I prefer to have the inner lines smaller and the outer lines larger. I would also like to have a calligraphy-type brush stroke to the line...I am looking into the calligraphy tool in Inkscape. I'm sure I'll have fun playing with that.

Anyway, I ran across Inkscape's latest blog entry here: http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/ ... hlighting/ and I saw a picture of a sheep there that drew my attention. The line styles shown on that sheep is the type of look I would like to go for in my clip art design. I use flat color fills, not gradients...just an FYI. But I like the inner lines smaller and the outer line that surrounds the clip art heavier, as shown on the sheep. What is the best way to achieve that?

Ideally I would like to NOT use closed shapes any more. I like the free style of the pencil tool I used to play with in Illustrator, as it is more free and I have to worry less about layers and arranging the shapes accordingly (front, back, etc.). The layering of images got really tedious. I would like to enjoy the creation process more and focus on just the line art and simple fills.

Anyway, any tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much! -Melissa

One way is to select all of your paths that make the image and duplicate them. With the duplicates selected do Path>Union. Adjust the stroke width up and send the union path behind the other paths that make up your image. You now have an outline around the whole thing and the stroke can be thicker than the strokes of lines inside the image paths.

Oh that's so simple...I'll have to play with it and see how it turns out! Thank you so much. -Melissa

Post your results if you get a chance. I just wanted to double check that my suggestion would work and this is what I got:

That's about what I got. Now I am trying to decide if I want to use the free-form calligraphy tool with a simplify added to the strokes as I finish it up, or just the pen/node tool. The latter looks much more controlled and crisp, but I like the artsy feel of the calligraphy tool! We'll see. I think I'll need to color it all in a separate layer under the line art with polygons (again the pen tool). Still playing around with options.

I'll try to remember to post some results as well. Thanks again for your help!